


it's a moth hole life

by serenfire



Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Humor, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Pre-Slash, a la retconning AOU Clint, civil war spoilers, just carrying on what the Russos intended, returning to the good ole Hawkeye vol 4 Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 18:53:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6765760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint forges a new life for himself in New York City.</p><p>This includes calling Natasha at random times of the day, wearing Crocs instead of boots when breaking and entering, rescuing a small pizza dog, and all the rest of the mishaps Clint gets into without an actual adult to supervise him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's a moth hole life

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, if you haven't read Hawkeye Vol. 4, do it now. Favorite characterization of Clint and Kate EVER.
> 
> @anyone I know irl: do not read thanks

“Well,” Clint smiles apologetically, “you _did_ say that we were still friends.”

Natasha looks at him, blinks slowly as if she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing in front of her, and surreptitiously checks the street. “Just to be clear,” she sighs as she lets Clint in, ushering him up the stairs to her second-floor safe house, “this _isn’t_ a front for me to be arrested for helping known criminals?”

Clint gawks at her teasingly. “What, _me_? A _criminal_? Nat, I would never.”

“Your friends did give me this lovely bruise,” she counters, pointing to the bit of green poking out from under her carrot-colored hair as she jiggles the lock on the door and cracks the damn thing open. Predictably, it sticks.

Clint frowns. “Why couldn’t SHIELD just put a safehouse in the Upper East? Why does it have to be in Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Because in the Eighties, SHIELD had more funding to put safehouses in the USSR, not New York City,” Natasha says, flinging her keys onto the counter, and Clint throws his duffel down on the carpet spelling _Welcome_ in dusty letters.

“Cozy,” he frowns, kicking the dust up in the air as he toes his combat boots off.

“Careful,” Natasha warns, opening the fridge and frowning at the contents. “I miss the days when we could order our handlers to pick up milk.”

“Yeah, now that Coulson’s busy with sucking up to the Prez and keeping Kree tech all to himself,” Clint laughs, settling beside her. There’s one (slightly) moldy piece of pizza in the fridge, which he takes gleefully. He hasn’t eaten since he got out of Ross’s prison.

Natasha wrinkles her nose as he braves the poisoned taste buds and eats it.

“What?” he protests. “It’s _food_. I’m only human.”

She nods, and Clint knows she understands what’s going on underneath the bravado, as she doesn’t argue with him swallowing the last of the moldy pizza with difficulty.

“Do you miss them?” she asks.

Clint doesn’t need to clarify who she means. His family. His wife, his kids. The people he had sworn his life to, before his latest mistakes on the job led him to never being able to see them again.

“‘Course I do,” he laughs, but Nat knows who he is and won’t take any of his shit, so he drops the bravado at the door where his duffel lies, and shrugs. “But it’s in the job description, isn’t it? I sacrifice everything for the cause. At least you’re still here.”

He feels like he should do something; lean in and kiss her? Smile at her, reassure her? Cry? Clint doesn’t know. He hasn’t felt this lost in _ages_ , not since Barney left.

Nat pats his arm. She doesn’t know how to do reassuring. “You can camp out here,” she tells him. “I’ll be around, maybe.”

* * *

Nat isn’t around. As soon as Clint falls asleep in the master (and only) bedroom that night, on dirty dusty sheets with moth holes in them, she leaves, pinning a note up to the fridge that says _Gone to DC, xx_.

So Clint has the apartment to himself. He unpacks his duffel into all of two dresser drawers, it being the same duffel he took to the showdown when he assumed he would be back within the day. Maybe the week.

Then he connects the Wi-Fi. He’s not old enough to know _what_ era the router is from, so he trashes it and buys another one with the rolls of cash he has on hand. It’s not like he’s _rich_ and on the run, but he can spare some cash for Wi-Fi. Always.

Then Clint spends mind-numbing hours on Pinterest, looking up soothing pictures of cats and avoiding the ones with kids hugging the cute creatures, because they well up a sort of regret within him. He shouldn’t have even _started_ a family, but that’s what he gets for being optimistic this time.

Another ex-wife to add to the mix.

* * *

 

Target practice from his fire escape window, it turns out, is more fun than he thought it would be. It ranks up there with shooting at Target targets in the middle of the night, except he shoots Old Cranky Man Next Door’s laundry line until it tips over and flops underwear all over the blind lawyer’s balcony below him.

Well, he was aiming for it to fall off the building completely and end on the grass. Having not tested the wind conditions of this small alley between two New York buildings before, Clint calls it a win and retreats inside before anyone can catch him with a compact bow and ask questions he doesn’t want to answer.

* * *

 

He buys milk, and bread, and meat, and cheese. He washes off the old cracked mugs sporting Mets logos and cobwebs, and gives himself chocolate milk moustaches for the first few days before he spots himself in the mirror and looks too much like his kids.

Then, he resorts to drinking out of a cup like an _adult_ , ignoring the pains in his heart. Clint washes the bathroom, and the sorry excuse for a den, and the bedroom. Twice. His hands itch of bleach and his toilet is spotless, which is more than he can say for his former bachelor pads, but he’s still alone.

Outside his window, the sun rises and sets on Hell’s Kitchen, and Clint tucks his bow and quiver into the bottom dresser drawer, amidst socks he will never wear because he now has Crocs, thank you very much.

* * *

 

Natasha places a collect call from Hong Kong in the middle of Clint’s unhealthy reverie of memories and regrets, when he’s re-evaluating everything he’s ever done in his life.

As soon as he picks up the phone, she says, “You’re re-evaluating everything you’ve ever done in your life, aren’t you?”

He sighs. Puts down the WSJ. “Yes.”

“Well, you should _stop_.” Natasha sounds pissed, even thirteen hours ahead of him. She also sounds like she’s calling in the middle of a commotion on her end, which isn’t surprising to Clint in the least. She likes to talk to her friends while snapping necks of the more unfortunate.

“What am I supposed to _do_?” Clint says, voice cracking. He puts his head down on his empty table. “Come back for me, please. Everything’s easier to deal with when you’re here.”

Natasha sighs, and something that sounds suspiciously like a crowbar smashes into the phone. “Shit, I gotta take care of this—get a hobby or something, Barton. Tide yourself over till I get back.”

“And when are you getting back?” Clint asks. The phone disconnects in his waiting, and the patient alarm sounds in its wake, incessant and rattling his hearing aids.

He slams his phone down on the table. “Fuck,” he tells the empty table. “Guess she’s leaving me to deal with this on my own.” It would feel better if he had someone or something to shout out instead of the unmovable table.

Clint takes a deep breath to keep himself from breaking down.

* * *

 

So, a hobby. He can do that.

Clint Googles his neighborhood and finds a nice, if low-end, gym nearby. He dresses in his most inconspicuous purple (as opposed to his black leather combat outfit and his conspicuous purple) and visits it.

Empty and smelling of sweat and air conditioning. Excellent.

Over the weekend, Clint takes his compact bow to the gym in his duffel, avoiding attention on the main streets there, as his face has become famous in his absence. One of the Missing Avengers, Traitors Gone Rogue.

He can’t be discovered at one of the last untaken SHIELD safehouses in the country, or else he’ll have to go to Canada. And Canada’s _cold_.

He sets up a makeshift target at the gym that still proudly hangs up a poster for Battlin’ Jack Murdock, who died decades ago, and unfurls his bow for the first time since the showdown. Not that Clint’s keeping track of time, but it’s been seventeen days since the battle, and Clint doesn’t want to lose his edge.

Not when he may need it at any second.

So he practices for hours, his arms going numb up to his elbows. In Crocs, (because it’s the worst day to forget his combat boots), his ankles bruise, but Clint grits through the pain. He’s still got it. He hits the bullseye, every time, even when he does cartwheels and reacts to unseen assailants.

Thwack. Bullseye. Circus reflexes.

At the end of a four hour session, no one else has appeared in the gym. So Clint thinks, maybe this is a front for something and he, the Unassuming Avenger Who’s Supposed to be in Prison, has made a mess of someone’s plans.

And then he thinks: naw. It’s just a shitty neighborhood with more opportunities on every street corner to get fit than an outdated gym.

As he’s leaving, he bumps into someone lounging on the street outside. “Sorry,” Clint says hurriedly, and the other man shakes his head.

“No problem.”

“Hey, I know you,” Clint says without thinking, and then wishes he were mute as well as deaf. Would be less embarrassing.

The blind lawyer glares in Clint’s general direction and taps his cane on the ground like a threat. “Oh, really.”

“Yeah,” Clint says, throat constricting. “I think we live in the same building. I, uh—I knocked the clothes onto your balcony.”

“Oh,” the man chuckles, his stance immediately changing. Clint notices that he’s holding himself up with the intention of a Russian assassin. Good training. “So you’re the one that wears the threadbare briefs.”

“Uh, no,” Clint laughs. “That would be my neighbor. I kind of _pushed_ his laundry off his balcony, for kicks.”

Beneath his red-tinted glasses, the man smiles genuinely. No amount of Russian training could fake good old-fashioned New York camaraderie over shitty neighbors. “Matt Murdock,” he says, sticking his hand out.

Clint shakes it. “Clint,” he says. “Clint Romanov.”

* * *

 

This time, Natasha seems to be calling from the middle of a traffic accident. Cars honk in the background of her call.

“Slow the _fuck down_!” she screams at someone as he answers his phone. “Sorry, that’s my mark.”

“SHIELD’s got you chasing marks?” Clint asks, surprised.

Natasha’s lack of response clues him in.

“Natasha,” Clint drawls. “ _Who_ has you chasing marks?”

“T’Challa,” Nat admits as Clint hears a screech of motorcycle tires. “I’m chasing a few leads for him, to help us bring Bucky out of cryo fully intact.”

“And how’s it going?” Clint asks. Maybe they could avoid talking about—

“How are you doing?” Natasha interrupts him, changing the subject with no possibility of getting out of it. It’s the phone equivalent of a deer caught in the headlights.

“Well, I think I found a friend,” Clint frowns. “Hard to tell. More of a person who won’t kill me for using their gym, now.”

“Name?” Nat prompts.

“Um, Matt.”

“That’s great, Clint. How’s your hobby hunting going?”

Clint hesitates. He knows how this sounds. “I’m, um, shooting arrows in a gym for practice. It keeps me on my toes.”

The screech of tires stops suddenly, and Clint can imagine Natasha parked by the side of the road, high noon, scowling into her iPhone. “Barton,” she says as gently as she can, “you know you’re not coming back into the field with us. Not after getting arrested by Ross. Even if we wanted to, you can’t be seen or you’ll be tracked.”

“I get it,” Clint interrupts. “I’m on the bench indefinitely, until I get enough plastic surgery not to be recognized. I’m on my own.”

“ _Clint_ ,” Natasha says, and a few gunshots sound into the receiver.

Clint pauses the requisite time to allow her to fire back at the assailants, and then snarks, “Yes? I’m waiting.”

“I’ll be back,” Nat says, breathless suddenly. Reloading. “I’m coming back to New York, Clint. But you can’t count on me, okay? You’re on your own _now_ , but I’ll be back. I’ll always come back for you.”

Clint smiles, on the verge of tears. He wants to scream, but all that’s in the room is the empty table, and it doesn’t care. “I understand,” he says, and hangs up this time. He didn’t even get to tell her that he’s using her fake last name, now. He wonders if that makes them fake-married.

He screams at the empty table regardless.

* * *

“—And that’s how I got into the bar fight,” he grins earnestly up at the nurse who doesn’t grin back, not at all, as she checks his vitals.

“Really,” she says, unimpressed. “You told the other guy, and I quote, that his ‘poker face sucks and he is totally the Black Widow in the disguise’.”

Clint shrugs magnanimously, and then remembers his shoulder is pulled out of socket. And screams, but only a little bit.

“Well,” the nurse says after his entire left arm is bandaged and Clint has no room to wiggle or even shoot his bow in the next few days (shame, that). “You’re clear to leave, Mr. Romanov.”

Clint tips her with the greasy bills he got from infiltrating that creepy Japanese business meeting with people he’s _pretty sure_ have been around since the 1500s. But what does he know, he’s deaf.

Truly deaf now, because his hearing aids got crunched in the fall off the tenth story window, and he doesn’t have enough rolls of cash to replace those. They’re like liquid gold.

He remembers how to read lips. He’s _totally got this._

Clint limps out of the hospital, arm in a sling, still smelling blood from internal bleeding every time he sniffs, other pedestrians looking at the stitched scar across his scalp as he limps in the direction of the bus station.

When he gets to the bus station, he realizes that he doesn’t have enough money for a single bus ride, and he’ll have to high-tail it back to his apartment. Well, at least he brought his combat boots for this mission.

In the alleys on the way back to his apartment, he overhears an argument outside of a back door. Two bikers, head-to-toe in leather and tattoos, growling at a dog. Drunken sneers echo off the pavement, and the dog yelps, cries, hides itself in a corner.

Clint flexes his newly back-in-socket shoulder. Sure, he’s up for a real bar fight.

He thoroughly regrets his decision five minutes later, when the bikers are unconscious on the ground before him, but his shoulder is absolutely toast. Clint smiles at the dog and gingerly picks him up, resting the poor pup’s weight on his good arm. He can feel the creature’s ribs, and silently swears to treat it better than anyone has ever done before.

He finally has himself a true friend.

As Clint trudges back in the rain, he tucks the dog under his coat and it warms his heart as the dog stops shivering. “I’ll name you Lucky,” he decides.

He feels happier than he has in weeks.

* * *

 

When Natasha finally comes back, it’s an anticlimactic moment. Lucky is eating Clint’s leftover pizza from the day before, and the TV is on: mindless news from the Presidential election. Clint _really_ hopes it’s not going to be down to the sunburnt HYDRA pawn against Bill Clinton’s Third Term, but then again, what’s it to him. He can’t vote.

The doorbell rings. Clint sighs and puts his sling back on—presentation matters, after all—and goes to open the door.

When he does, Natasha is waiting for him, a duffel over _her_ shoulder, sporting a new sports jacket and cool shades. She leans into his personal space and gives him a peck on the cheek before throwing her arms around him and saying, “I’m back!”

“I can see that,” Clint says, rooted to the spot, hugging her. Shit; she smells so much better than he does in the two months she’s been away. He smells like sweat and wet dog.

Natasha notices said wet dog immediately, and Lucky allows her to pet him. Rolls onto his belly and pants as she really works her fingers into his now-luscious skin.

“Grown on organic pizza,” Clint grins at her. “All-natural.”

“Yeah, Barton, we get it, you leave lots of scraps,” she says, but she also sounds happy for him.

Clint is very happy for himself, too. They can both be happy together.

Then Clint notices the person in the doorway. She’s decked out in a purple jumpsuit, and has a duffel on her shoulder as well.

“Uh, Nat?” he asks. “Did you pick up a stray, too?”

“Nope,” Nat says, still mostly focused on Lucky’s well-being and his petting quota. “This is Kate. She also needs to use the safe house, so you’ll have to cohabitate now.”

Clint raises an eyebrow at Kate. She raises an eyebrow right back.

“Hawkeye,” Kate greets, tipping an imaginary hat at him.

Clint can’t stop smiling. He hasn’t been called that in _so long_ , and he may not be Hawkeye anymore, what with being on the run from the law and all, but he can pass on the mantle.

“Hawkeye,” he says in return, nodding, “meet Lucky.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please, share with me your praises of the Russos' good work at my [tumblr](http://www.trans-reyskywalker.tumblr.com)!


End file.
